Prof. Patrik Španěl elected to the Academy Council of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He will coordinate research evaluation and Open Science agenda

Congratulations to Prof. Patrik Španěl, who was elected to the Academic Council at the LXV session of the Academy Assembly on March 18, 2025. The Academy Council serves as the executive body of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS). Including CAS President Radomír Pánek and Science Council President Pavel Baran, it consists of 17 members.

The inaugural meeting on 1 April 2025 marked the beginning of their collaborative efforts and the allocation of responsibilities. Patrik Španěl is responsible for the following areas:

  • Coordination of the preparation and course of periodic evaluation of CAS institutes and coordination of this agenda with the national system for evaluating research organisations.
  • Coordination of activities in the field of Open Science within the CAS.
  • Conceptual activities related to the participation of the CAS in EOSC (European Open Science Cloud), RDA (Research Data Alliance), and CoARA (The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment).
  • Representation of the Vice-President of the II. research area in addressing scientific-organisational matters of the institutes in sections 4–6.

Patrik Španěl (*1967) graduated in Physical Electronics from Charles University in Prague in 1990, earning his RNDr. degree. He continued his doctoral studies at the University of Innsbruck, where he was awarded the degree of Dr. Rer. Nat. (equivalent to Ph.D.) in 1994 for his dissertation on experimental studies of reaction processes in ionised gases at thermal energies using SIFT and FALP techniques.

Currently, he is engaged in research on ion-molecule reactions in the gas phase, focusing on mass spectrometry for the analysis of trace gases and volatile organic compounds. He contributed to the development of the SIFT MS method, which is used in the semiconductor and pharmaceutical industries. He actively collaborates on its application in interdisciplinary biological, medical, environmental, veterinary, and food research.

Since 1997, he has been a researcher at the J. Heyrovský Institute of Physical Chemistry of the CAS (JHIPC) in Prague, where he also serves as Deputy Director for Science, Chairman of the Institute Council, and Head of the Department of Ion Chemistry in the Gas Phase. In 2007, he was appointed Professor of Chemical Physics at Keele University in England, where he had previously completed a two-year postdoctoral stay from 1996 to 1997. Until 2016, he worked at the Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine and later as a visiting professor at Imperial College London.

For his work, he has received numerous awards, including the Czech Academy of Sciences Award for Young Researchers (1999), the Otto Wichterle Prize (2002), and the Academic Premium (2021).

Patrik Španěl is a member of several expert councils and committees, including the Presidium of the Czech Science Foundation (GA ČR), the Scientific Council of the University of Chemistry and Technology Prague, and the Editorial Board of the Journal of Breath Research.

At the beginning of his tenure on the Academy Council, he was the author or co-author of 330 publications with an H-index of 63 and more than 13,000 citations.